The author, unsurprisingly, completely misses the point when it comes to discussing the power differential (both imagined and actual) between women and men. I have noticed this to be very typical. It’s hard to rank male feminist assholes, since they tend to be consistently stupid, obtuse, irrational and utterly blind to their own hatefulness. If this were a footrace, the male feminists would all be behind the starting line, attempting to determine whose transgender superhero underpants signified peak obsequiousness. The sound of the starting gun would trigger them into a sobbing mess of puppy and Playdoh and coloring book trauma victims – jazz hands, please!
Critics of the MRM and the culture wars in general start with one basic assumption: the struggle is a zero sum game. For every gain, there is a loss. For every advantage accrued to Player One, a disadvantage is incurred by Player Two.
Feminism was an explicit effort alternately on the part of (and on the behalf of) women to gain power in society starting from a place that was comparatively unequal to men. That often involved taking power that had been previously held by men and redistributing it.This simply isn’t true, but it is the one fallacy critics cling to desperately, because any admission that the game is not, in fact, zero sum, requires a discussion of opportunity costs. Very simply put, opportunity cost is what you give up by choosing A instead of B. Feminists insist that the “gender wars” are a zero-sum game in which social resources, including power, are finite and if women gain n+1, then men necessarily are left with n-1. This is politically expedient because it allows feminists to mock the purported “losers” without having to address how choices impact outcomes. You will see this particular commentary over and over again: men are just mad cuz women have the power now.
In a grand sense, this redistribution was an unequivocal good. But it also made some men realize they had lost power as a result of their gender and decide to organize themselves along those very gender lines. It was, for many of them, I’m sure, the first time they thought of themselves as a something other than normal. They felt pushed out of a cultural center they didn’t even know existed—and it made them angry.
Uhm, no. This is laughably simplistic. Milo Yiannopolous recently wrote a column explaining why a “wage gap” is both fair and reasonable, that nicely illustrates why any discussion of power that does not include a calculation of opportunity costs is pure political sophistry. The whole article is worth a read, but here is a quick summary of his 11 reasons women should be paid less than men:
- Women like taking care of men, children and home and want to work less
- Relationships (at all stages) cost men more
- Men pay more than their fair share for everything
- Men need to save for divorce rape
- More money is insurance against an unfair criminal sentence
- Women refuse to do the nasty jobs
- Men worker harder and longer, deliver long-term benefits
- Men risk dying at work
- …and at home
- Men are discriminated against in higher education
- Incentivizing women to stay at home reduces the harm of single motherhood
What if that is the gender equality we’ve been searching for all along? Feminists insist gender is a social construct (except when it’s not *cough* Caitlyn Jenner *cough*) and that absolute equality can, and should be our goal as a fair-minded society that values all humans beings equally. This is all part of zero-sum thinking. There are only six cookies. If you have 5, I have 1. Let’s fight over the cookies down to the last crumb and ignore the fact that while we fight over cookies, we’re all starving, the cookies have gone stale and we’ve reduced them to a pile of crumbs anyways.
What if we turned the quest for gender “equality” into a calculation of opportunity costs both men and women incur with the choices they make? The calculations themselves can be gender neutral. It doesn’t matter how individual men and women structure their lives: everyone is free to make their own choices and the role of the law is to guarantee that opportunity costs are factored into our notion of justice and fairness.
How would that work, in practical terms? Well, we already assign “danger pay” and “shift premiums” to jobs that feature unusual risks of injury or death or represent physical or mental hardship in some way. How difficult would it be to calculate a “breadwinner” premium that applies to family breadwinners? Taking on the majority of financial responsibility for a family leads to greater stress and reduced life expectancy for the breadwinner. Just as premiums can be calculated for insurance products and risk can be quantified, why not compensate breadwinners for the opportunity costs they incur by being breadwinners?
This seems to be a matter of a risk algorithm added to income tax forms. Who earns more? Here is your premium. This premium belongs to you, and you alone. The reality is that most breadwinner premiums will go to men, because men are the predominant breadwinners. Why should they not be compensated for that? The same formulation could apply to adults who chose to be dependent on a spouse for whatever reason – raising children, raising chickens, just because …. what the hell difference does it make? What is the value of the opportunities you are forgoing to stay at home full time? Did you give up a career as an oncologist? That is worth $x. Did you give up a career as beauty queen? Pageants will earn you $x for y years = here is the opportunity cost of your missed rhinestone tiaras.
These kinds of calculations would lead to much greater fairness, and would do a great deal to undermine gynocentrism, I believe. All adults would be compelled to acquire the best skills they can before choosing to either become dependent or accept the dependency of others. The dependent adult is giving up the opportunity to monetize the skills they have, and their contribution can be measured in terms of that cost. The person accepting dependents is giving up the opportunity to not monetize their skills, and while that seems counter-intuitive, that also has a calculable cost. The grave mistake we are making, I think, is refusing to calculate the costs of accepting dependents, because most of the humans accepting dependents are men.
And no, single mothers are not accepting dependents in any meaningful way. Most of them are supported by the state as a proxy husband, and that’s a key part of the problem. The Economist recently ran a feature on the struggles confronting working class and blue collar men in the developed economies of the West, and while it is somewhat heartening to see a major publication acknowledging that men as a social class are in need of attention and support, their conclusions were depressingly infested with feminist ideologies and assumptions.
Kind of ironic that the Economist couldn’t diagnose the economic conditions that have created a workplace in which women are excelling and men, by and large are suffering. Women are working in mostly non-productive, non-revenue generating positions funded by taxpayers: the entrepreneurs, inventors, creators, builders, designers, extractors, makers and doers are still overwhelmingly men and they fund women and their bullshit paperwork jobs.
What is the opportunity cost of funding bullshit jobs? Less money for the builders, makers, extractors, doers. Less money for (mostly) men. It all comes down to how you think power works and what the rewards for power should be, or shouldn’t be. Feminists, and progressives in general, who identify as powerless no matter what their material circumstances, insist that power is a zero sum game. You have it or you don’t. Power is finite. Equality demands that power be diffused across the population in exactly equal measures and that’s equality, literally.
Reality is rather different. No one wants power diffused equally. Definitely not women, and not most men, either. Go back to Milo’s list – women are, by and large, happy to forgo power because society has developed a sophisticated calculus to compensate women for their losses if their choices turn out to not be so great. What we refuse to do is calculate the losses men incur by making the inverse, complementary choices that make women’s choices possible. Women don’t have to earn the same money men earn to enjoy their lives, because men allow them to make that choice.
Why should that be free?
Milo is right: men should be paid more than women. I suspect we can all agree that gender equality should be measured in terms of opportunity, not outcome. But we need to take that one step further and understand that choices come with costs – everyone’s choices come with costs. We like to pretend that our world has undergone an absolute sea change in terms of gender relations – we have revolutionized the traditional power differential between men and women. But we haven’t. All we’ve done is allow women to continue to make traditional choices while stripping men of their traditional benefits and denying that men have incurred a cost in permitting women to continue to make traditional choices that reflect traditional interests and traditional goals.
One solution is to rail heartily against traditionalism in all forms. Another is to refuse to play such a rigged game, as MGTOWs do. One can refuse to admit the game is rigged, or insist the beneficiaries are actually the victims, as feminists do. Or we could accept that gender equality, measured in terms of exactly equal outcomes, is never going to happen, because most of us don’t want it to happen. Men, and supporters of the MHRM in general are not angry that women have gained power where they traditionally had none (often because women’s power was informal in nature, and thus largely invisible, although not less effective for being so) – we are angry that the men are expected to pay all the costs and forgo all the benefits. It’s fine for women to have power. Very few women are interested in power to begin with. We’re interested in aligning ourselves with powerful men (however that is measured). We want to be taken care of.
And that’s fine.
As long as we agree that being taken care of comes with costs, and not just costs to women. How many men would consent to caring for women and children if they knew they would be compensated for doing so, just as women are compensated? And no, I don’t mean a pat on the head and a “well done, you” as they head off to family courts to be “divorce-raped” as Milo puts it. I mean for every dollar they earn, a mechanism exists to compensate men (or any breadwinner) for the responsibility and the risk they assume in taking on dependents. I mean that every asset has a built in calculus that awards the person who takes on the greatest financial responsibility with a proportional share to reflect that responsibility? I mean that any adult who agrees to care for other adults and children is compensated fairly and equally for that agreement.
Instead of fighting traditional gender roles, yet refusing outright to make them mandatory, what if we simply compensated them? Yes, on average, women will make far less than men. If we protected both parties, and rewarded both according to what they brought to the table to begin with, we would likely find ourselves back in a world with adults dedicated to making their relationships work in the long term, because divorce without the rape isn’t much fun at all.
If we can compensate workers for taking on risks and topping up their packets with “danger pay”, why can’t we compensate men (or women) for taking on the risks of dependents, while working to mitigate those risks at the same time? I suppose in theory, we don’t even have to work to mitigate the risks. Leave the family courts as they are – just calculate danger pay accordingly. How many women will waltz off to divorce court if it turns out their husbands owe them jack shit, and perhaps even have a claim to a woman’s future income?
Refusing to get married, avoiding the Fraud of the Rings, as Peter Lloyd calls it, is one strategy. But what if, instead of dodging the bullet, we compensated men for risking the bullet instead? We pay soldiers to take that risk. We’ve made marriage one of the riskiest propositions a man can make, short of combat. Why not pay him for taking the risk?
Danger pay for marriage?
An idea worth considering?
Lots of love,
JB
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